Collected Wisdom Powers New Web Products

New services let you watch where people go, see where they've been, collect their answers and learn from their wisdom.

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PALM SPRINGSWhat are people doing? What are they thinking? Where are they going? Where have they been? Important questions all, and the answers could prove valuable to venture capitalist and consumer alike.

To know them online, however, one no longer needs a crystal ball. Instead, a host of new online sites and services are lining up to deliver real-time information about what everyone else is doing, saying, and even thinking online.

Collected wisdom is one of the key trends emerging at the DEMO 07 conference in Palm Springs. A few new companies exemplified the urge to do as others do and connect with fellow surfers in the process.

Trailfire, which emerged from private beta this week, lets Web surfers mark web pages with "Trailfire Marks." Those creating the marks need to download a small Internet Explorer 6, IE7 and Firefox 1.6+-friendly extension. Once that's installed, users click on the browser bar icon, and a box appears where they can name the trail, add a small comment, and then surf to other related sites. The hope is that "people who are passionate" about topics will create these trails, explained Trailfire chief executive John O'Halloran, and guide others.

Someone could, for example, start on this Web site, begin a Web Trail, navigate to Gearlog, add the site and some comments and then, maybe, jump to ExtremeTech. The key, though, is that these Trails are not for users who are really energized about the topic. Each Trail is indexed by Google and can appear in search results. So they're discoverable by other users who do not need the extension to view and follow them.

Other users can even add comments about the Trails, and links to Trails can be embedded as standard HTML on any site that accepts Web links.

Currently, there are only about 10,000 trails, but O'Halloran expects that number to grow fast now that they're out of beta. The business angle: using what Trailfire knows about the Trails and those viewing and creating them to deliver highly-targeted ads and offers.

Check out our standalone story on Me.dium.com, which allows you to "follow" others around the Web.

CircleUP's new Web site lets a user query online friends, family, co-workers, or others via an online, forms-based survey format that can be delivered via e-mail, instant message, and SMS text messaging. It then aggregates the responses into an easy-to-read online report.

The service reports back answer patterns and even lets the user export the responses to an Excel spreadsheet. Results can even be made public, if so desired.

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The service is currently in public alpha release and will ultimately be supported by ad revenue. CEO John Payne says the company eventually plans on offering an ad-free subscription service, as well.

Hungry? Boorah.com (for "Boo," or a thumbs-down, and "Rah," for a thumbs-up), seeks to aggregate all the restaurant reviews Web surfers, restaurant critics, and bloggers are already creating into one comprehensive, find-the-best-restaurants site.

Launched just this week, Boorah covers just San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, though coverage is still thin on the latter. It uses a natural-language engine to process restaurant reviews it finds on the Web, pulling relevant information to create a composite summary review and even ratings. The site currently covers 75,000 restaurants and has pulled in roughly 200,000 reviews. One can search by cuisine, common occasions (like "anniversary"), location, and ratings metrics to find the perfect eatery in a given locale.

A 25-year industry veteran and award-winning journalist, Lance Ulanoff is the former Editor in Chief of PCMag.com.
Lance Ulanoff has covered technology since PCs were the size of suitcases, ?on line? meant ?waiting? and CPU speeds were measured in single-digit megahertz. He?s traveled the globe to report on a vast array of consumer and business technology.
While a digital veteran, Lance spent his early years writing for newspapers and magazines. He?s been online since 1996 and ran Web sites for three national publications: HomePC, Windows Magazine...
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